48

Down through the hand that is a fish he sees again the house on the shores of Maryland. He sees the boathouse and the boat that he and his father had built one Summer because his father had gotten it into his head that it would be a good thing for a father and a son to build a boat, together. And it was a good thing. He and his father bonded. That's the word they used. A bond. A connection. Stronger than a connection. The desire, fulfilled by shared activity, of uniting, of becoming one. Atonement. At-one-ment. He cannot see his mother, but he knows she must be in the house. There is a species of anxiety about the house, however. Perhaps it is in the physical environment of the property. The Chesapeake is unremitting in its erosive attack on the shoreline. When he first moved there, he used to go down to the shore to hunt fiddler crabs. There were always scores of them. By the time he moved, there were none. The erosion felled a half-dozen trees. Nothing did any good. He spent hour upon hour with his father, the two of them laboring beneath the Summer sun to place large rocks along the shoreline in order to stay the erosion. Eventually, his father ended up buying enormous chunks of broken pavement from the county, but even this did not work. His father envisioned the house itself falling into the Bay.